Since
the dawn of the twentieth century the federal government has experienced
massive growth (with legislative and executive branch agencies blossoming
anew in each successive administration). The Obama Administration has
added immensely to this national experiment, testing if liberty can
endure the presence of an ever-expanding state, an experiment that has
invariably failed wherever it has been tried around the world. Regardless
of how it is promoted, the essence of government is law and the essence
of law is the exertion of coercive force to cause people to do that
which they may wish not to do. Moreover, as government grows so grows
corruption and abuse of power. There is a tipping point at which the
cost of government and the corruption in government become too great
for the public to bear. If we have not reached that point, we are fast
approaching it. When we do, therein lies the greatest opportunity for
a restoration of our Constitution of liberty and of the Republic that
Constitution creates.

“My
reading of history,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “teaches me
that most bad government results from too much government.” Jefferson
predicted in the early years of the Republic that our government would
grow and so would corruption: “Our country is now taking so steady
a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit:
by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary
consequence.”

In
troubled times, like the present and the Great Depression, the public
ear is largely receptive to politicians’ exaggerated claims that
government holds the promise of employing the unemployed, restoring
economic stability, and protecting the sick. A sense of helplessness
combined with a view that the market has failed leads people to relinquish
their right to self-governance in favor of the new prosperity promised
by demagogic leaders who, in fact, can do little to fulfill their promises.
Truth be told no government program has succeeded in arresting unemployment,
sustaining economic growth, or preventing illness; that government can
achieve those things is an illusion but one that large numbers of Americans
in each new generation believes realizable despite the proof of history.
That government cannot achieve those ends should come as no surprise
because government is by operational definition parasitic. It depends
for its existence on removing from the mouth of labor the bread it has
earned. As government grows, it necessarily requires more from its host
to function. It imposes an ever greater cost on the private producers
of goods, services, and jobs, sapping resources that are more efficiently
expended when in response to market demand. The imagination of government
planners is limitless because the money they expend is not their own.
Thus, ambitious calls for new agencies to redirect human behavior proliferate
along with price tags that vastly exceed the actual revenue in public
coffers. Milton Friedman was fond of observing that there is no limit
on the willingness of politicians to spend other people’s money
because they experience no personal hardship from the expenditures and
enjoy great political gain from them.

Thus
it is that those in power naturally seek more of it. That ever expanding
aggrandizement comes with an ever increasing cost which must be exacted
from the private sector to feed political ambition. In the early years
of a free state, jealous of parting with private power, citizens demand
limits to government and government fears them. In the latter years,
government becomes so powerful that it succeeds in removing limits to
its acquisition and exertion of power, and the people fear the government
and with that fear goes the liberties of the people. Thomas Jefferson
put it brilliantly: “When the people fear their government, there
is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”
By increments at first and by leaps thereafter government grows as each
newly elected politician lusts for more power than his or her predecessor
had, never halting in its expansion except when the public revolts.
In a socialized state, such as that which largely exists in America
today, government determines market outcomes and grows at a very rapid
clip, becoming a perpetual growth machine: The weight of tax and regulation
destroys business, which business is said to have died from market failure,
which business is then replaced by greater government control and ultimately
government ownership until all that which was private becomes public.

There
is a tipping point at which government growth so taxes the private sector
as to retard private growth. That taxation comes not only in the form
of confiscation of earnings but also in the form of stultifying regulations
that inhibit free will. When one, the other, or both become so onerous
as to dissuade most people from entering into business or inventing
new goods or services, then the economy stagnates and eventually fails.
Ironically, it is at that very point when the clamoring for more government
reaches a crescendo. That is because the argument that the market has
failed is a soft sell, while the argument that government has failed
is a hard sell, particularly for those who run for public office (presumably
because if they thought the government a failure they would not run).
Those who are unemployed or insecure in a market filled with companies
that cannot function adequately or at all prefer to believe government
an ultimate solution when parasitic government can never be greater
than its host lest it kill its host and itself. The choice is thus left
to the electorate to tolerate ever greater government acquisition and
control of the private sector until the mediocrity of bureaucracy becomes
the common element and most, if not all, of us become civil servants
or to reject government and turn to the private sector.

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This
macrocosmic reality is enlivened by a corrupt microcosmic reality which
grows within a growing government. As government becomes more powerful,
those who wish to retain positions of economic prominence in the private
sector must involve themselves with government. A common quid pro quo
occurs as government invades private contract, redistributes wealth,
and imposes public interest regulations in the form of prior restraints.
On the one hand, the anxious captain of industry comes to the realization
that government actions affect market share and influence who wins and
who loses. On the other hand, the ambitious politician comes to the
realization that his quest for personal wealth and power is aided greatly
by using the instrumentalities of government to build barriers to market
entry that enhance the economic position of industry leaders. Those
in government, who seek to enhance their own power and wealth find it
beneficial to align themselves with wealthy industry leaders and to
do their bidding through regulation and legislation.

Those
in power thus transform the government into an institution for sale.
The elected and the appointed use their powers to impose regulatory
barriers to market entry, to grant licenses and benefits to a select
few, and to use the instrumentalities of government to advance the interests
of a select minority at the expense of everyone else. Through those
corrupt machinations, politicians and agency heads assure themselves
riches and influence after they leave office, and captains of industry
insure their businesses insulation from competition and above market
rates of return at the public expense. When, as at present, the business
of government becomes overwhelmingly preoccupied with satisfying the
demands for market barriers that come from the captains of industry,
the republic is at an end and a bureaucratic tyranny arises in its place.
Abraham Lincoln foresaw this happenstance in the earliest days of the
industrial revolution, writing:

I
see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . Corporations have been
enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the
money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working
upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in
a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

What
the public ear seems reluctant to hear is a lesson taught us in every
prior crisis, whether military or economic. There is an inevitability
to corruption in government; it is inherent in the nature of an institution
that creates no wealth of its own and plunders the riches of a free
market. That fact was well understood by the philosophers of the Enlightenment
and by our own founding fathers. Jefferson wrote: “Experience
hath shown that even under the best forms of government those entrusted
with power have, in time, by slow operations, perverted it to tyranny.”

Government
may be succinctly defined as a monopoly police force that through law
exerts its will to alter or prohibit freedom of action. In the view
of America’s founders, government is a necessary evil (necessary
to defend against forces external and domestic that would deprive people
of their lives, liberties, and properties) with one essential purpose—to
defend the rights of the governed. That purpose, the Declaration of
Independence tells us (as did John Locke), is why governments are instituted
among men and why men consent to be governed and to relinquish to the
state their natural right to act against those who threaten their freedoms.
There is no greater purpose to good government than protection of the
rights of the governed, and there is no greater purpose to evil government
than the violation of the rights of some or all to enhance the power
and riches of those who govern.

Big
and corrupt governments are common in our modern world. The instrumentalities
of those governments have effectively been sold to industry leaders
who, in turn, reward elected and appointed officials responsible for
the sale with lucrative post-government positions and rewards. With
the expansion of the preferred method of restricting market entry, prior
restraints, our liberty has increasingly been circumscribed. We pay
through taxation and, ultimately, inflation, for the cost of our own
enslavement. Americans are slow to appreciate that liberty recedes as
government grows, but they appear to be awakening to the reality that
a government that expends $13 trillion dollars more than it takes in
is more government than they can tolerate. In the words of Jefferson
in the Declaration of Independence: “all experience hath shewn,
that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
But there is a tipping point and we are fast approaching it.

That
individuals love to be free is a fundamental verity. So long as they
perceive themselves free, they are content to tolerate the failings
of government, but when they perceive themselves in a state of servitude
sooner or later they will replace the government that oppresses them
and restore the freedom that is their birthright. Few would have given
Ron Paul much of a chance to influence public opinion as greatly as
he has, yet his message of a return to a Constitution of liberty is
striking a chord with more and more Americans. Whether those Americans
whose love of liberty is greater than love of self will reclaim a majority
of the electorate and remove from office the many whose love of self
is greater than love of liberty remains to be seen.

But
the outcome of that evolution in American history will determine when
the Republic created by our Constitution will be restored. I am not
willing to accept that the question is whether the Republic will be
restored because I believe that the American loves liberty too much
to allow the Republic to become a lost relic of history. The question
is not whether, but when.

Jonathan
W. Emord is an attorney who practices constitutional and administrative
law before the federal courts and agencies. Congressman Ron Paul calls
Jonathan “a hero of the health freedom revolution.” He has
defeated the FDA in federal court a remarkable six times, four times on
First Amendment grounds. He is the author of The
Rise of Tyranny.

In troubled times,
like the present and the Great Depression, the public ear is largely receptive
to politicians’ exaggerated claims that government holds the promise
of employing the unemployed, restoring economic stability, and protecting
the sick.